Bob Dylan was right, “The times they are a changin.” The third verse of his 1964 mega-hit is quite prophetic:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
Now that the votes have been counted and every congressional district in Orange County will be represented by a Democrat, I’m guessing many late, great GOP heavyweights like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Beckman, Walter Knott, John Wayne, James Utt, John Schmitz, Bob Badham, Marian Bergeson and Tom Fuentes are rolling over in their graves. If any of them were alive today, they would need oxygen. Sing it, Mr. Tambourine Man.
Denny Freidenrich, Laguna Beach
No question OC was where the much heralded blue wave made landfall. Voters of all political party affiliations and unaffiliated electors alike who voted for winning candidates earned the right to celebrate. Of course, divided government means Democrats no longer have the luxury of being the opposition party rallying resistance to one party rule, and we can all hope that leaders of both parties can do better than what we have seen for the last decade. That said, it must be noted that the song quoted above was popularized when the Democratic Party and its constitutionally installed federal officialdom controlled the White House, both Houses of Congress and the US Supreme Court. Democrats drunken with one party rule were presiding over a military conscription policy that discriminated against the poor and racial minorities, prosecuting a Democratic Party leadership’s war in Vietnam a majority of Americans opposed, ultimately costing 58,000 American lives, most under 21, tens times more than the War in Terrorusm. The Democratic one party rule regime in 1964 also was unable to overcome Democratic opposition to civil rights legislation ending racial segregation in public. President Johnson later would acknowledge the 1965 Civil Rights Act was made possible with the support of Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. So it is historical revisionism and ideological narcissism to assert Dylan’s song was prophetic as to the 2018 midterms, any more than it was as to 1994 and 2010 midterms in which Clinton and Obama lost more Democratic seats and lost control of Congress than Republicans who gained in the Senate and list far fewer seats in the House. OC and California May have one party rule, but the nation does not. Thus, Dylan’s song recognizes that the times are always changing because the Constitution empowers the people to reward success and punish failure so what government does right is sustained and what government does wrong is corrected. If anyone think one party is any less capable of both success and failure than the other listen to a couple of other Dylan sings, including “Idiot Wind” and “Slow Train Coming”.